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CRTC Approves Usage Based Billing In Canada
qvatch writes with this from CBC News: "The CRTC has approved Bell Canada's request to bill Internet customers, both retail and wholesale, based on how much they download each month. The plan, known as usage-based billing, will apply to people who buy their Internet connection from Bell, or from smaller service providers that rent lines from the company, such as Teksavvy or Acanac. ... Customers using the fastest connections of five megabits per second, for example, will have a monthly allotment of 60 gigabytes, beyond which Bell will charge $1.12 per GB to a maximum of $22.50. If a customer uses more than 300 GB a month, Bell will also be able to implement an additional charge of 75 cents per gigabyte."
So in otherwords prices for all Bell broadband customers are going up $22.50 a month.
So the majority of canadians don't want this but the government goes the other way... nobody listens, oh joy
net neutrality means "treat the ISP like a utility", and guess what???
Most utilities (even some PPTs) sell metered service: the more you use, the more you pay.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This is what government run, net neutrality gets you. I am sure glad the FCC is working to fix the system in America!
this is actually an improvement over their current practices.
they've been billing based on usage for years now, but they charge 8$/GB instead of 1.12$.
unless the article meant Gb, in which case it's meaningless and just validates their current business model
What is the CRTC thinking? Bell should be split into two companies: one responsible for the internet infrastructure, another for selling internet service to end-customers. It makes absolutely no sense for Bell to be able to rent its lines to Teksavvy, then tell it how to run its business. Bell is abusing its monopoly power!
What can we do about this?
For those of you just joining us, it may be easy to forget the days when consumer Internet access wasn't unlimited. Dial-up connections were called "56K" but actually around 40-53K in practical use, and services like AOL and Prodigy billed by the hour to look at your e-mail, post on limited message boards, and use their clunky early Web browsers.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs. There were even a few national ISPs back then that offered free access if you were willing to look at ads on your screen. Natural selection shut these companies down and a string of mergers leave us basically back where we started with the Bells dominant and their upstart competitors being the already-hated cable TV providers.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
As I Canadian, I feel strongly against this.
Fuc \n [Internet Quota Exceeded, please insert 75$]
Unsurprisingly no mention is made of reduced fees for people consuming less bandwidth. I guess "usage based pricing" sounded better than "we're capping monthly bandwidth and charging if you go over".
Australia internet usage - we've had these for a decade or so now. At least significant competition (even with consolidation) between ISPs has seen usage plans increased as infrastructure is built.
Where I was once on a 3GB/month cap, I'm now on 200GB/month. Unlimited is on the (distant) horizon for certain areas.
Oh, get ready for some massive internet bills too.
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
This is one of many reasons why Bell will never again see a dime of my money. I know they're all corrupt, greedy bastards but Bell seems to take it to extreme levels. Their sense of entitlement has led to them losing massive quantities of customers (beyond what would have been expected by the enforced competition rules). They have failed, utterly, to view their customers as anything of value and it's starting to show. They may be making cost cutting decisions and taking steps to increase revenue but, until they realize that keeping customers satisfied is important, they will continue to lose money and continue to be forced to lay off massive portions of their work force.
Welcome to the end, Bell. It is of your own making. I hope you enjoy the ride.
Haha.... this is a joke. In said example, a person would blow past that "allotment" just maxing their connection for a little over a day. To hit the money cap takes only another 20 gigs, so less the 10 hours at max speed. They should of just said "We get to legally jack up prices another $22.50/month on top of our monopolistic prices"
they want their internet plans back.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
What's up with that?
Hell, I live in the UK and was hit by this (HARD) by two ISPs before I moved to VirginMedia, who just throttle me between 4pm and 11pm, but let me download what I want (I've hit over 500Gb this month after a failed RAID array).
Virtually all internet plans in Australia have download limits, many even count uploads in the montly allowance. And excess usage can be as high as $150/GB beyound your allowance. 60GB/month plan costs me approximately $70/month.
will only lead me to block more advertising. They eat up most of the bandwidth..
How much competition is up there? More competition would not hurt [the consumer]. Trouble is consumers do not know that things could be better for them.
No wonder places like Malawi or Uganda, that are thousands of miles away and much poorer, receive gadgets like the iPad, iPhone and Droids much earlier than Canada which shares the border with the mighty USA.
Wake up Canada...wake up!
How is this new? This is already being done in Canada - I have a 60gb limit with my Rogers internet service.
I say if they want to do this the capped rate has to be stated before any peak rate in advertisements
IE 60GBytes/month cap == 0.185Mbits/sec
Or they can state how long you can connect at your peak rate.
IE 5Mb/sec with a 60GB cap == 1.11 days of actual usage per month
What it is:
1st bit = $X, presumably $CAN
2nd bit through 60GB = free
60GB - 80GB = $1.12/GB
80GB-300GB = free
300GB+ = $0.75/GB
What it should be:
First bit = $X
2nd bit through 60GB = free
Each GB thereafter = less than $X/60.
In other words: consistent per-GB charge with a monthly minimum and possibly a small fixed charge, meaning your initial allowance per-GB cost is more than your per-GB cost for usage beyond your allowance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The real point of this is that Bell is allowed to impose this pricing on their wholesale customers, IE other ISPs that lease Bell's ADSL lines. For example my ISP is not Bell, however my ADSL line runs through a Bell DSLAM which then pushes the traffic to my ISP, thus my ISP will be forced to start billing me for usage because Bell will be billing them per GB instead of just for my line. Basically the CRTC just sounded the death knell for the smaller ISPs who stand next to no chance at competing against a giant company that already is allowed to throttle their traffic and limit bandwidth to 5Mbit, and now is allowed to set their bandwidth costs.
I am from Australia and I have lived with caps and over charges for many years. I've seen everything; hard limits, throttling, reduction of service, and over usage charges. But what I really want to know is Where is my choice?
If Bell want to put in place a system whereby they charge for usage then so be it. Heck if they price it competitively (or the rest of the government monopoly jumps on the bandwagon) then it'll probably work ok for them. But I as a consumer who's stuck between a rock and a hard place want the choice between being capped and throttled at 60GB or paying over usage.
When Telstra first implimented similar policies they where hammered by the consumer watchdog for not giving customers information nor choice. I personally received a $1600+ bill for one month of internet usage where the Folding@Home client managed to get stuck in an infinite loop of attempting to download a new core. I got out of that one, but nowadays the system here is that we have a choice of plans ranging from caps, to overusage charges, and where companies offer such things they are forced to provide usage meters to their customers so they may accurately track how they are going.
Despite what you think of this (I think the same), I really pray that the Canadians don't have to go through the hurdles of what we went through for the first 10 years of internet caps. Though at least a capped pricing scheme between 60GB and 300GB is a great start to an otherwise turd idea.
That's a cute idea, but it is wrong.
With utilities, you are using consumable resources. Water costs per gallon. Gas costs per cubic foot. Electricity costs per ton of coal. If you don't use these resources in your home, then the utility doesn't burn up these resources at their end.
With the internet, the "utility" uses bits whether customers data are in those packets or not. As a second goes by, X number of Mbits are used and gone forever. You CANNOT save them like the other utilities I mentioned. It doesn't matter if anyone was using the network then or not, the resource is available and then gone forever.
That's why I think you should pay for a data RATE. Not a data QUANTITY.
I'm pretty sure their lines are capable of carrying far more bandwidth than they're putting out, and with these bandwidth caps, they'll be able to make even more money while providing less service.
Since people don't have much choice on who to go to, it would be nice if they allowed competitors to use the same lines.
Rogers already does this. I thought Bell already did this as well to customers that went over the monthly cap.
Ridiculous to charge 75c per gigabyte when wholesale bandwidth costs are less than $1/megabit.
While the exact limits and overage charges can be argued over, the core concept seems to make sense, and it's a relatively sensible way to address massive BitTorrenting and the like.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Usage billing was already being done by most ISPs.
This move just let Bell (completely ridiculous) lets bell impose bandwidth charges on the competitors who get their local loop from Bell.
These guys generally are paying for their own backbone to the internet so it is ridiculous that they have to pay bell again for that bandwidth.
Anyway more monopoly supporting moves from the CRTC, not a real surprise.
This is precisely the same scheme that the republicans used for the medicare drug plan.
The plan costs x amount of dollars, the first x amount of drugs are "free", then there is part in the middle you have to pay for, and then everything onto of that is paid for, up to a certain point, and then you have to pay for them again.
Brilliant!
As a Canadian living in Korea, where I pay $25/mo for 100Mbps/100Mbps, this sort of news gives me further incentive to stay in Korea.
It's not a simple case of the telcos raking in more cash, it's a complex arrangement of supply and demand. Businesses will charge what they can get away with and people will only pay as much as they're prepared to pay.
At the end of the day, it costs money to install and maintain the internet infrastructure. That money must come from *somewhere*. Just like higher prices for bigger pipes, consumption charges put a market driven limiter on the demand which helps the existing infrastructure last longer thus reducing the need to raise more money to build ever-bigger infrastructure.
For those that argue cheap, fast internet is a "Right" and say the govt should pay, then the infrastructure costs come out of taxes and either taxes go up to compensate or more likely other services will suffer so that the politicians don't get seen hiking taxes again.
For those who say the ISP wears the cost, well they're businesses, not charities so we'll skip over that. So if the costs are spread across the whole user base, light users are subsidizing the heavy users. And if you think that's only right and fair, perhaps I can interest you in this Communist Manifesto I have here. Why should I pay $3 for "access to bananas" if I only want 3 when this other guy also pays $3 for "access to bananas" but takes 40?
The only way that's fair to all is to charge by usage. The light users only pay a bit, the heavy users pay more. Wouldn't you agree it's more fair that bananas are priced per banana and you pay for what you consume?
The concept of the bottomless cup of coffee only works when your profit margins for the donuts cover the cost of water and coffee grounds. It doesn't scale to international infrastructure. North Americans have been spoiled by so many years drinking a bottomless cup of internet but it simply is not a sustainable business model. It's the reason we have a net neutrality debate at all.
One further thought: North American users are blessed with a high population density that permits economies of scale that we can only dream of in other nations. I'm currently paying $100/month for an ADSL2+ connection with 70GB/month. The idea of 200GB via a 5Mbit connection for $23/m is pretty appealing from where I surf! Look at the bigger picture and realise how blessed you are and enjoy the blessing. No one likes a spoiled rich kid crying because he hasn't had his daily foot massage!
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
This particular scheme will encourage people to use more bandwidth than they already do. I wouldn't call that a great idea.
in my industry, labor is manual, and 45% of costs...
if I could cut payroll to 1/3rd- by paying $3.00 an hour-
I could drop my prices in half.
what are tech salaries at ISP's in hong kong?
how much wire do I have to run per 100 customers in hongkong vs. canada
7million people in 426 sq miles vs
vs 34 million people in 3.8 million sq miles..
ya-- it just doesn't add up-- why are prices different in hong kong....
the expenses should be the exact same....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The problem isn't that they are charging regular users on a scale, it's that they are charging their wholesale customers this way. All of the ISP's in Canada are required to sell their pipes to other companies, this is to create competition, as many of the companies are working off former legal monopolies, (crown corporations), and competition is few and far between. What this means is that competition is going to be COMPLETELY shot in the ISP world.
I take it the previous billing Bell Canada did based on downloading was actually illegal. And, now it's not? What am I missing here? I remember quite clearly getting hit with extra 'usage' charges on my internet bill every month. That was well over a year and a half ago.
I have nothing compelling to say
Please don't let Bell kill off Teksavvy - they are one of the few bright spots on the blighted landscape of Canadian internet access (sent over my 300GB/month ADSL line...).
I am a big fan of well thought-out metered service. I think it gives ISPs an incentive to provide better infrastructure because the more bandwidth customers use, the more money the ISP makes. Without metered service, the incentive is reversed - the ISPs want to discourage you from using any bandwidth at all. In any form of business it is better that the customer's interests and their vendor's interests be aligned rather than at odds.
But the proposed pricing here is not an incentive to the ISP, its punitive to the customers.
At a marginal cost of over $1/GB that's well over 4x the cost of a blank DVD.
Marginal pricing for co-lo bandwidth is in the 5-10 cents per GB range - up to 20x times less.
In both cases, that's marginal cost - all the fixed infrastructure costs are already covered in the baseline monthly fees.
So, in a case like this we get all the downsides of metered service with none of the upsides - the costs are so far beyond the scale of what's reasonable that they essentially put the customer's interests at odds with the ISP again. The ISP setting these pricing levels is being short-sighted, they think they will be able to rake in a ton of bucks and at the same time not feel much pressure to upgrade their network capacity.
The actual result will be that customers are so afraid of the excessive fees that they will deliberately limit themselves. Maybe the ISP even thinks that's a good thing but all it really means is lost revenue opportunities. Only a monopoly would think it is a good thing when customers choose to not give them money.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
1990. Telcos observed to profoundly "not get" charging for the pipe, rather than for the traffic. IETF board members spend a non-trivial portion of their lives educating Congress and policy makers. About end-to-end. About data common carriage - what's now called net neutrality, About backbone finances. About what it takes to have this flexible and innovative space. It worked. It flourished. ARPAnet became NSFnet became the Internet and the Web. It wasn't clear back then that it would have a chance to stick. The threat that the telcos would stunt it loomed very large. In an alternate universe... we have AOL and Prodigy and UUNET and dial-up BBSes and walled gardens. Instead we got the Web. The fraking WORLD fraking WIDE web. Toddlers know what URLs are. A quarter of everyone on the *planet* uses the net. Is that amazing or what?
2010. The telcos and cable companies win the 20-year policy war.
Maybe.
Rogers has been doing this for at least the past two years or so. It's not ideal, but you clearly know what you're getting into, and the idea is sound.
Just a note in no real way related to this, comcast has a 250Gb a month bandwidth limit, above this they... well IDK what they do, apparently nothing since I'm quit consistently over it, most month using more than twice me "limit" with nary a phone-call.
The structure of all this is hidden from consumers so it's pretty difficult for the average user to understand but this scheme amounts to double billing.
These charges are for WHOLESALE clients.
So Bell is selling ADSL access services to ISPs. Those ISPs are required to pay for a high capacity link to the Bell backbone in order to receive the traffic generated by their customers. That link between the ISP and Bell is the point where Bell used to be billing for usage. A lower volume ISP would pay for a link that could burst up to a certain speed, they would pay for the loop charge and the would pay for BANDWIDTH usage. A larger ISP may decided to pay for a dedicated link which allows full time 100% usage of the link they have paid for. They could saturate their link 24/7 and they would pay a higher price for their bandwidth fee to Bell. That is where the billing of bandwidth on a wholesale basis has occurred for years. This link is 100% dedicated to the transport of ADSL customer traffic between Bell and the ISP. It doesn't get used for any other purpose.
Now on TOP of the fee the ISP's have already been paying to Bell for bandwidth on their dedicated link to the ADSL aggregation backbone they now want to bill the customers directly for the traffic they inject into the ADSL backbone. So they now collect a toll at the entrance to their network and the exit of the network effectively billing twice for the same ISP to customer traffic.
If Bell feels they are not charging their wholesale ISP's enough for the bulk pipe they bought well then who's fault is that? Those pipes are on contracts and when those contracts expire they can renegotiate those rates.
I don't understand why the CRTC is going to allow this.
Actually I do understand why they made the decision to allow it, if you look at the makeup of the CRTC boards they are stuffed full of big telecom ex executives. The majority of power at the CRTC comes from people who used to hold jobs at the old monopoly telecoms providers. I just don't understand how they can defend their decision as their explanations seem to defy the facts.
If you live in Canada and this didn't piss you off enough then there's always this you can use to fuel your rage.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that apparently TFA is about wholesale rather than retail pricing ...
Based on the experience in New Zealand (which faced this problem earlier than elsewhere, due to the high cost of sending data underwater) most consumers prefer a fixed bill. Nowadays, after some initial thrashing around, most ISPs offer plans where if you exceed your data cap your bandwidth is cut down to a little better than modem speed, but you don't incur any extra charges. My ISP allows you to choose to pay an extra charge to increase your cap on a given month.
I expect eventually the rest of the world will catch up and offer similar schemes.
My $25/month server has 1000GB on a 10Mb line.
What a cash cow this ideas is! Nothing like billing the customer for an infinite resource such as bandwidth that costs nothing to produce. TimeWarner is trying this in the Southern US markets and Comcast is likely to jump on the bandwagon soon.
How much do you want to bet that slowly Bell's default home page and customer portal and web sites start becoming bandwidth heavy with auto-play videos and animated content all over. This will be the same idea as billing mobile phone customers per-minute charges for accessing their own voicemail system even on the company's own network (Sprint does this in the US.)
Canada is already being slowly pushed down the slippery slope of bullshit Intellectual Property protection with their last copyright bill and the large companies there are starting to get the whiff of what is happening and are pushing schemes like these against their customers. With a near-monopoly size that Canada's Bell is they are able to make this happen without fears of reprecautions since the chance that their plans sticks and stays around to create a metered Internet billing system is a lot lower than the risk of a combined lash back by the Canadian consumers.
If this plan succeeds and metered bandwidth start becoming the norm in Canada and the US we are going to see a slow decline in the advancements that the Internet is starting to bring us such as HD quality live-streamed movies, TV, and series content that is now becoming the mainstream here.
The reports from the past few weeks are showing that many people are canceling their Cable TV service since they are starting to get their entertainment content from the TV network's web sites, NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube, etc. Once the people get switched to metered content and realize the sheer size of video content and watching it on the Internet causing their bandwidth to get used up in a matter of hours they'll either start getting pissed and switch to non-metered providers or if it's too late they'll be pissed that they are now left without a choice.
wifi is getting more and more interesting. Eventually there will be combo of fiber/wifi/laser crossing the borders and this kind of crap monopoly will disappear.
CRTC no longer represents the interests of the consumers so maybe it would be best to dissolve such institutions.
Lets say your provider charges by the Byte, but delivers 100Mbs full duplex bandwidth un-ratelimited.
How would that compare to a service that was 8Mbs down by 1Mbps up with "unlimited" byte quantities?
I'd buy the cheapest 100Mbps full duplex per byte service myself...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Charging per GB used is totally reasonable. As a customer one might prefer a flat-rate unlimited deal; but it's pretty well impossible to say they are ripping you off if they charge you more when you use more.
Otoh, the proposed rate structure is pretty tardalicious.
If they want to be utility-like they should bill like utility companies do. Paying $1.12 per gig should mean that if I use 1 gig a month, I should receive $1.12 bill. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If my ISP implements this horseshit, I will close my account the same day and switch to the one that either bills for usage or charges a flat fee, but not both.
Do you watch TV online? (Hulu/Netflix/etc?) Because in my family, we do, and we'll blow past your 30 GB in a week or so.
Today, few people are watching TV online, but that figure is growing rapidly. My own habits have spread to my 5 employees and my business partners, due in part to my endorsements. Add in online gaming, video chats, working from home via VPN and remote-desktop, and perfectly legit, normal usage suddenly passes your threshold for "reasonable".
But why? Bandwidth is one of the few things which has no unit cost! Think about it...
In the garage at my house is a router. Currently, it's an "N" router with a 1Gb wired hub. Let's look at its history, roughly:
15 years ago, it was a 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network.
10 years ago, it was a 10 Mbit switching hub.
5 years ago, it was a 100 Mbit switching hub.
Today, it's a 1000 Mbit switching hub.
My point? the 1.5 Mbit Lantastic network used about the same amount of power as the Gbit switching hub - less than 1 amp of power, a la power brick. And yet, there are 3 orders of magnitude in useful performance, from the top to the bottom. That's from 1, to 10, to 100, to 1000 units.
BAD CAR ANALOGY: Can you imagine having a car when you are 16, that goes 20 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 21, that goes 200 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 26, that goes 2000 MPH?
Can you imagine having a car when you are 31, that goes 20,000 MPH?
See how silly this becomes? Bandwidth has no effective unit cost. Charging by the unit is counterproductive and is a detriment to social progress, and works to impede social advancements like watching the TV show you want, when you want to, and video chatting with Aunt Gladys before her Hysterectomy.
It's not just irritating, it's just a very bad idea founded in bad physics.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You should see what it is like in Australia. Here's an extract from one ISP's web page, I think this is typical.
"Monthly usage allowance means combined upload and download data transfer. 1 GB = 1000MB. Unused usage allowance is forfeited each month. Additional usage charged at $0.15/MB and is capped at $300 from the first bill cycle on or after 29th of November 2009."
That's $150/GB for excess. And they short-change us on the GB's they provide in the cap.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
..SaskTel continues to provide the cheapest ADSL in the country with no usage caps or overage fees and measured speeds that actually meet their claimed rates.
Of course SaskTel is a Crown Corporation that by its' charter is charged with the responsibility of providing service to the people of the province, and is not governed by the profit-motive of the typical corporation.
This is the idea model for all of Canada's telecommunications. Anything less makes us beholden to private interests that will always put their profits ahead of our needs.
This price for 300 G is even more expensive than a bi-directional 100 Mbits line with 320 GB/month that you can get retail at less than 75 USD. That's even more expensive than what we can get in Australia. No doubt that they will make A LOT of money here.
To anyone using them: get in touch with the local data center if you need some downloads!!!
Recalling back to a day and age when my internet connection was metered based on the number of minutes I used my VAX/VMS terminal, and also looking back not too far to days when my cellular phone bill was strictly metered (and pricey as hell for that matter), I don't have a problem with my ISP selling me a metered service. Provided, of course, the costs are justifiably sane. A basic cap at 60GB, and a secondary cap at 300GB (for an additional CAN$22.50) does not sound excessively unreasonable to me, provided that the base cost isn't something like CAN$100. 60GB/month is not an unreasonably low ceiling for the majority of home users. I use about 50GB/mo, but that includes a lot of work related file transfers as well as streaming media over a (theoretically) 50Mbps connection (which is often closer to 30Mbps in practice). It is much better that you have a reasonable metered charge for more traffic when you need it, going up to 300GB, rather than having your ISP throttle or even cut your connection because you were a bad boy/girl for exceeding some invisible cap to an unlimited plan.
And that is the whole point. If the providers are selling you exactly what they promise, I see no problem. The problem was with the rise of providers that promised unlimited access, but then turned around and treated paying customers like thieves when they actually tried to use it in an unlimited way. (Delivering as advertised is not a value added service here now...) As long as I know what I'm paying for, fine. If someone can provide it cheaper, I jump boat. Sounds fair and square to me.
"""
It's not a simple case of the telcos raking in more cash, it's a complex arrangement of supply and demand. Businesses will charge what they can get away with and people will only pay as much as they're prepared to pay.
"""
HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Ever hear of a monopoly? Or what about if all the companies decide to do basically the same thing? You're assuming that people have a choice which is the most fucking retarded thing I've heard in a while. Especially, since one can't really be a part of modern society without an internet connection anymore.
In Canada, Bell and Rogers own almost everything as far as telephone, wireless, internet and television is concerned.
Rather than upgrade their old networks to accommodate the usage of new subscribers and the usage of that current consumers had signed up for, they cracked down on usage to screw consumers.
A couple months ago the Bell and Rogers shifted everyone's bandwidth cap to the next price bracket, without changing speed or price:
Unlimited -> 175GB
100GB -> 60GB
60GB -> 25GB
etc.
This made many people look into alternative ISPs to try to get reasonable service.
Since Bell has a monopoly on the last mile service for dsl based service, they looked to the CRTC to allow them to implement "usage based billing," to get more money from these ISP and to worsen their caps.
As an added bonus, they caused enough uncertainty about future caps of alternative ISPs that people are staying with their current providers until they see what the end result is.
This is not about making people who use less, pay less.
This is not about net neutrality (you'll still get throttled as much.)
This is about doubling price of bandwidth and making sure that there is no alternative.
It should work both ways, and is at best extortionist. The net work has a capacity limit which every paying user now experiences, in the new scheme this fixed limit is cut in two tiers, one subscribed to, the other for extra pay. In the end people pay more for the same service, and the service is made artificially scarce to the benefit of people that don't pay extra. There should be a law against this type of arrangement. You dont'go to a restaurant and get served to little for the menu price to then get offered the extra you want at double the price. Shit, you do in some cases..
Catch up, seriously. The only reason that our data was capped so eairly and so harshly was Telecom's profitering and simmilar anticompeditive games with double billing. When forced to bring down international data costs they upped the price of national links to compensate crippiling most national free bandwidth plans. We have only started to make any real progress because the government forced unbundeling on them meaning that we finally got not only ADSL2 - 5-10 years late - but also much lower contention rates. The big issue that remains is the cost of international bandwidth which is again largly controlled and overcharged for by Telecom with very few compeditors.
I know this as I am also in the technological backwater that is New Zealand to and have to pay prices that would make most Canadians cry for a 30GB cap with extra bandwidth costing easily $2/GB on some ISPs with no cap on charges. I know some people who have been saddled with $400 bills for using around 120GB (their own fault but still)
I really do hope that the rest of the world does attempt to avoid this situation otherwise the internet will become a global joke not just a national one.
My ISP already has plans like this. I'm pulling the numbers out of the air but it's something like:
Plan 1: Pay $69/month for 100GB (shaped after that)
Plan 2: Pay $49/month for 20GB, then $(something very small)/MB extra but no more than $79/month (shaped after 100GB)
Charging based on usage is a good idea in theory (and in practice for me where I download not much :), but you can trust that the marketing dept will screw it up and make it so complicated that they'll need supercomputers just to run the billing system, and mega-supercomputers to run the billing inquiries/complaints system.
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/warning.asp?page=internetEng.htm&lang=E
I really can't see how it can be both ways. If you "pay for services" by having ads shoved in your face like broadcast TV, okay... some. If you pay for services by usage based billing like when calling internationally to grandma, okay... some. But how pissed off would people be to make an international phone call and have commercial interruptions as well?
This is one of the reasons net neutrality should be maintained. It's bad enough every person with interest in what's going on with the internet is trying to bill you, tax you, sell your information and rape your eyeballs, now you have to pay more when they do it to you more.
Well look at is you purchase PC games as "digital downloads" They are now up around 15GB Downloads and are getting larger all the time while at the same time, it is getting harder to find box copy's of alot of PC Games in canada these days.
Here is an example of where bandwidth can get used up quick, now think about those 15GB games now so you purchase 4 games in a month at around 15gb each you just used around 60gb(CAP) easily downloading your game purchases, you are already at your limit now, but we are just getting started, you will use up even more bandwidth by playing the games online, from downloadable content(DLC) or just from downloading and installing patches and/or new hardware drivers etc.
I don't see it becoming uncommon for alot of the Canadian PC Games in the near future are all going to be forced to pay extra a month because of the increasing size of Digital Downloads, Patches, Hardware Drivers, DLC, and Bandwidth usage from Online Play
...your local non-oligopolistic wireless provider. More often than not, that's a non-incumbent mobile provider. Here in Canada, a good example would be Wind Mobile.
Real competition in the wireless category is the best, new hope for ensuring real competition in the internet service category (see what Clearwire is trying to do in the US, though it is currently struggling and not necessarily non-incumbent). Wireless has the potential to one day offer the speeds we currently see in landline infrastructure (though not fiber optic) and more than enough to serve demands for things like HD IPTV and video conferencing. I can assure you that the incumbents are most afraid of the potential of wireless: the potential for competition that can start competing with lower upfront fixed costs and risks for infrastructure than they had to pay way back when they laid cable in the ground.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL NON-CARTEL BASED WIRELESS PROVIDER !!
...waking up one morning without Internet access at all because you used too much of your "unlimited" service or downloaded more than some magical, super-secret number of bytes that nobody knows.
I recently downgraded from traffic shaped 20 mbit virgin coax cable to 8 mbit post office adsl... so let's do the math.
On virgin I could get 20 mbit for 90 minutes, and then hit the cap, which cut me back to 5 mbit, so, doing the math at 3,600 seconds to the hour...
20 x 3600 x 1.5 = 108,000 mbit before the cap
5 x 3600 x 22.5 = 405,000 mbit after the cap
for a total maximum of 513,000 mbit or (/8) 64.125 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This was UK£ 35 a month so 1.15 a day, therefore 55.76 gigabyte per UK£
On the ADSL I actually get 7.2 mbit, no traffic shaping, no cap.
7.2 x 3600 x 24 = 622,080 mbit or (/8) 77.76 gigabytes in 24 hours.
This is UK£ 19.95 a month so 0.66 a day, therefore 117.81 gigabyte per UK£
This gives is the MAXIMUM cost to the ISP and the MINIMUM revenue.
It also gives us MAXIMUM daily traffic for the ISP (assuming no local content, cache, etc)
Say my actual usage is 10% of this theoretical maximum, then just divide the cost, eg "x" GB/UK£, by ten, so virgin cable would be 5.57 GB/UK£ and PO ADSL would be 11.78 GB/UK£
SO.. a lot of the packages are like the family sized toothpaste tube, yeah, the tube is twice the size of the normal one, but the diameter of the hole in the cap is much bigger too, since they know you put toothpaste on the brush by length, not by volume...
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
http://www.patrickroy.ca/patrick-blog/blackwhiteorgrey "I'm sick of having trouble watching a simple low definition YouTube video because my ISP is overselling its pipes. The system needs to be fixed. Here's my $0.02 on the subject detailed in three scenarios : Black, White and Grey."
I'm a heavy internet user, and a very happy customer of Teksavvy. I run a business from home and download my share of high-bandwidth content.
I think it's fair that I pay a little more than you, but it's just as fair to say that you should pay a little less than me. If my cost is going to go up $22.50 a month, your should go down, say $5 per month. But you can bet that's not going to happen.
As Teksavvy president Rocky Gaudrault is quoted as saying, "It's in the thousands of multiples beyond what the costs are." This is less about fairly balancing costs between consumers and is more an excuse to charge heavy users more without charging light users less.
Bell is an evil company that hates its customers.
www.clarke.ca
Australia and South Africa aren't part of the 'modernized' world?
NZ, ZA, and AU are in the southern hemisphere. Cables from the temperate southern hemisphere to the temperate northern hemisphere are expensive; they have to cross the entire tropics and often oceans.
There are two parts, Bell Nexxia who are the wholesale DSL company and Bell Sympatico who are the retail arm.
The problem is that Bell Nexxia gives different prices/options to Bell Sympatico than it does to its other customers. The CRTC are completely spineless when it comes to dealing with any of the telcos.
Bandwidth is not consumed like a natural resource like water or electricity. Once a network connection has been created it runs at max speed constantly forever at virtually no cost. What you are paying for with bandwidth is for competition for access, not consumption. And all that HD Television is what is really hogging the networks, not filesharing (especially since sharing is distributed). But since the cable companies are also reaping the ad revenue from television, they give their proprietary and closed HD bandwidth for free and charge you for the free open internet. If people really value the freedom of speech and information, they are going to have to restle control back from the private monopolies and regain the networks the public built.
There is also massive taxes on this.
Provincial sales tax & federal sales tax (in Ontario it is 13% HST which combines the 5% GST and the 8% PST)
PLUS there is the special communication taxes and extra services fees.
You are looking at the very least an extra 20% for taxes and fees.
The problem is that you are a computer geek living by yourself. When you factor in the average family size of about 3 people, that 30GB usage of yours would be 90GB for a geeky family.
Well, if you buy into the notion that bits cost money, why shouldn't that family pay more? They pay for the increased electrical consumption of multiple people, why not the increased data consumption?
What is the incremental cost of going from 30 GB transferred in a month to 45, 60, 75, or 90 GB transferred?
The CapEx for infrastructure has already been sunk; how much more OpEx does it take to transfer those extra bits?
With electricity, you're using up resources (uranium, gas, coal) to generate the power (or adding depreciation on wind turbines). What resources are you using to transfer those extra bits?
The only one that comes to mind is a certainly amount of extra electricity needed to power the GBICs for those extra bits; the question is, how much more juice?
Mark Goldberg has a nice analysis of the decision. Note that Bell must first apply this usage based billing for all their existing retail customers before they are able to do so for third party ISPs leasing lines from them. This means they risk losing existing retail customers who have legacy unlimited plans, i.e. the ones who have been around the longest. In addition, their tariffs are actually being lowered, which will improve the profit margin of the independent ISPs. In other words, this isn't happening in the short term.
Side note: If you're a Teksavvy customer like me, they are also launching a cable-based service through leasing lines from Rogers as well. The details are up on their site, however I believe it's limited to the GTA only right now. You can get faster speeds, but lower caps. However, if the Bell usage-based plan eventually goes through, the caps will actually be about the same. I'm not affiliated with Teksavvy, I just happen to use them for Internet and home phone service and think they're awesome.
Amusing anecdote about how awesome they are: I have a Linksys WRT54GL router and flashed it with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware in order to bypass Bell's throttling when we signed up for Teksavvy. Eight months later, I convince my wife's parents to switch over (from Rogers, ironically) and they can now actually buy this same router along with the modem when they sign up for the service. So they do this, and I come over to set everything up along with the Tomato/MLPPP firmware on my USB stick so I can flash the router. After setting everything up, I discovered that they've already done exactly this. They've put the Tomato firmware on their, configured the modem for passthrough mode, set up all the login info on the router, and turned on single-link MLPPP to get around Bell's throttling. I literally had to do nothing but plug the wires in. Now that is what I call good customer service!
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Who is going to cover the cost of the software updates your computer requires in it's attempting to keep you safe? Why should I have to pay for downloads to fix the bugs in software which I purchased but don't own (remember it's licensed) such as Windows 7.
What about pushed software? Will browsers be forced to change so I can disable, on a case by case basis, the ability for a site to push to me? Unless one has full control and user friendly controls over the ability to download data charging per bit becomes a means of theft for the connection provider; charging me for things I did not order nor want.
What about handshaking and other forms of continuity used to maintain consistency on the web? Why should I be charged for a toggle bit as it is used by, and provides benefit to, the provider? Will the provider adjust charges based upon distance ala toll based highways -- the less the resources used the lower the cost?
Charging based upon usage simply does not work for the end user as the end user does not have control over the amount of data being down/up loaded. All charging for usage does is to give the providers a free hand into one's pocket book to extract as much money as possible.
Bandwidth is one of the few things which has no unit cost!
In residential and small-business last-mile Internet access, it is common practice to oversubscribe the upstream connection. Without charging for consumption, how do you expect to cover the investment to buy more powerful routers in order to alleviate upstream congestion at peak times?
The price to roll a service truck to fix faults with the 1 GB/mo customer's connection will never go down. It will only go up as wages goes up and fuel costs go up.
Internet service is very much like any other utility.
Internet consists of a rate and quanitiy component just like every other utility:
With water, you have service fee based upon a 19mm line entering your house with a minimum guaranteed pressure (that is the same as Mbps for internet) and most nowadays have a meter and are billed by the cubic metre (same as GB transferred every month).
Gas is identical--you have a certain size line and minimum guaranteed pressure, and pay based upon joules, etc..
Electricity, same thing--you have a big copper line that can handle peak currrent typically 100A and a main breaker to enforce that limit, and you pay a fixed "access fee" to get the amps (Mbps) and "cost of energy" for the kWh you use (GB each month)
You contend that the more power/gas/water you use the more reources you use and that this is not the case with the internet. You are wrong. If no customers are transferring any bits, then there are no bits going through their wires or being routed. The lower the number of packets being sent through their systems the less hard routers etc. have to work and potentially the less energy consumed (the the ISP has to pay for). Plus without metering ISPs cannot "oversubscribe" to the same degree and have to build out data centres and backbones and such faster than otherwise.
In many respects it is like water service. Historically for many it was billed at a flat rate because of just the argument you made vs. other utilities--Waterworks didn't pay for the water it treated and delivered by volume, so why would you install meters and bill customers that way. Well, as cities grew they learned why: give customers unmetered access to water and they'll use it without regard to real need or consequences of overconsumption, and the utilities also recognised as their treatment facilities neared capacity that the more water they treat the more it costs them (energy consumption, more maintenance costs, expaning water treatment facilities, etc).
Since water service metering started in the city I lived in the population has doubled and literally water consumtion rates completely stopped growing. When it started people complained that it was just to gouge them but adjusted for inflation water bills have stayed quite static as well (in fact they've gone DOWN slightly!). No it is just accepted as a fact that you pay for water by the cubic metre, you don't have to wash the car in your drive way and leave the hose on the whole time, you don't need to water your lawn 3 times a week and so on.
I hope someday soon telecoms wortks the same. Bits are bits and the WWW, television, telephone, radio...its all bits and in a great many cases they are transmitted over the same kind of infrastructure. So how come telephone bits are so incredibly expensive when television bits are so cheap and WWW is somewhere in the middle? To me it just makes sense that ISP would be just another utility and all of that media would just go through that and you'd pay like all the other utilities, so I have no problem with Bell emulating that billing model. What I have issue with is that Bell bills way different for TV or voice phone service and what the rates themselves are unreasonably high for the quality of service they offer.
This is not new. My parents (who live in Canada) have an ISP who charges some type of usage based scheme. http://www.cybernetcom.ca/highspeed.php
Utilities charge flat fees, too, to cover fixed overhead costs. If you look at your power bill you'll most likely see that there is a flat fee for the line itself, based on its rated peak capacity, plus a per-kWh charge based on how much you've used.
What the bill should look like is this:
One WAN connection rated for 5Mbps peak throughput: $9.99
20 GB of public Internet transit @ $0.25/GB: $5.00
Total Bill: $14.99
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
this just shows how much Canada sucks, nothing but monopolies and taxes.. the whole country is a sell out
who on earth caps data usage?? with internet content growing larger and larger, online streaming etc..
the CRTC is a useless organization paid off under the table by rogers bells competitor.i have not seen anything good come from this scam organization. small isp's are the only good ones around here that offer friendly service(not customer service from india) and unlimited use without having to worry over going over a 60gb cap. now thanks to crtc even than is going to change. all we have is monopolies gouging customers paying tolls, when the infrastructure is inm place to handle free unlimited usage without having to worry over being over billed every month. such a scam
Cogeco cable already does this.
I have a 60GB cap and 1.25$/GB beyond that.
I am a heavy user, and I have no problem paying my share, provided that share is reasonable. As it is I try to monitor my bandwidth so that I don't exceed my cap, I regulate my use month to month (which can be difficult to do, as they only update your usage statistics on a daily basis). Both the Cable and the Phone monopoly is killing Canada telecommunications and is making us non-competitive with the rest of the world. I really wish CRTC which is the governments extension to regulate these industries would grow some balls and actually do something about it. Currently Canadians are getting ripped off brutally, and if the CRTC is too antiquated to handle this anymore, it should be abolished and a new regulator created to do something about it. I think it is nothing short of criminal how these companies operate, yet there is absolutely nothing a citizen can do about it but pay. We live in an age now that access to the internet is required about as much as transportation. In the grand scheme of things, long term, this stagnation of our telecommunications is going to come back and bite us as other economies will grow and ours will not because of it. I have fought this before, and sent letters to politicians, however the telecommunications lobby is just too big. They basically do whatever the hell the want to and damn anyone that gets in their way. We should have capacity. If we don't, why not? What exactly are these corporations doing with OUR infrastructure? Anything except make money hand over fist? Even if we are lacking capacity, I am fine with paying for what I use, if the rates were anything approaching reasonable. Just to get a static IP address I would have to pay twice that what I currently pay, and even that is inflated. This is a stupid idea anyway, as they make most of their "free" money off "ma and pa" email checkers and internet browsers. I likely use more bandwidth on my iPhone 3G and my data plan than these people, yet they are expected to pay through the nose for a service they barely use. So like Bell is going to want to go in that direction. There is no way in hell that is going to happen. They just want to lower caps even further, and then charge through the nose extra high fees for anyone that exceeds those caps. How is it technology seems to be moving backwards with these people. In EVERY sphere of technology, as it advances, gets better and more mature, the cost of offering said services becomes less. How the hell am I paying more and more and more. Something is wrong with the model. Problem is the people in charge like it the way that it is, as they make a killing... why would they change it willingly for anything? They need to be forced, they need to be effectively regulated. The CRTC doesn't seem to actually DO anything.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs.
Nope.
Dialup computing services with pay-per-hour and/or other pay-per-resource-usage rates (such as CPU seconds) predated the Internet. As did email (which was free except for whatever you needed to do to connect to at least one other mail-excanging site).
The Internet (like email) began as an experiment and grew. The internet was started by building it on leased lines (paying the tellco a flat rate) and the sites themselves buying the boxes and doing the routing. It grew as military and educational institutions, along with the commercial entities doing business with them, hooked up on this unlimited (except for bandwidth bottlenecks and congestion).
By the time the congress changed the rules so anybody could play (and send spam - thanks, Al Gore), IP over ethernet was a major LAN technology and even some home computers had IP stacks in their OSes. So anybody who could sweet-talk a site with an internet connection into a feed could hang their high-end home machine on the net. This would typically be done with either a leased line (perhaps ISDN) or a local dialup line in an area with a flat-rate calling scheme. (You'd put in a second line at home and buy a modem, and maybe also pay for one more line and modem at your friendly feed - typically if it wasn't your company which wanted you online so they could sucker more work hours out of you at home or to get you to do your usenet reading off from company time.)
Then (now that it was legal) some enterprising people put together little ISPs (which I called "Mom-and-POPs"). They'd buy a computer, maybe a router, a terminal server, and a bunch of modems and lease a bunch of lines. Then you could sign up with them. Maybe you'd pay for 24/7 use of a line, maybe you'd pay less, or per-connect-hour, for shared access to an oversubscribed modem bank. But bandwidth charges were not typical: Use the width of your pipe if network congestion allowed it. (You'd typically also get a shell account on their machine, which would host netnews and give you an email account. You might have a storage quota, and using the account for compute-intensive stuff might be frowned upon.)
Of course the existing by-the-hour dialup computing services hooked up, as well, and offered netnews and other internet-based services, sometimes as an extra-cost option. But again the by-the-hour connect charge was an aberation, not the typical case, while the bandwidth was still all-you-could-eat.
The ISPs and the commercial backbones grew out of this. As they developed they cut various deals between each other over who paid who for what. But to the end users the bandwidth was still flat rate, limited only by the bandwidth of the last hop and congestion of the network behind it.
But as things grew the ISPs got folded into the telcos - who (as with the extra-charges for call waiting, three way calling, etc. which were just bits of software in their new switches) were on the lookout for ways to sell some trivial extra service and grab more revenue. And they rolled out fatter pipes that were massively oversubscribed / underprovisioned on the backhaul side, on the assumption that the users CURRENT usages patterns (mostly web browsing and email reading) would continue unchanged as technology advanced.
But tech DID advance - with VoIP, gaming, torrent file transfers, streaming, ... Their underprovisioned networks were starting to congest and the services were directly competing with their own - both their previous services (such as POTS and/or Cable TV) or their new "value (and cost) added" offerings. THAT'S where you started getting throttling (both general and by type-of-service), dumping users who actually USED the full bandwidth, and calls for bandwidth-related pricing.
So unlimited bandwidth usage was the norm, while limited (by something other than the last-hop bandwidth or network congestion) and/or metered services are the innovation.
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As an older person living on disability, which isn't much, paying in this manner would seriously limit my internet use. I think this is unfair. Comcast, (Scumcast), is my ISP and they charge a lot as is. I've had to cut out a lot of tv extras and this would seriously inhibit my use of the internet. Screw these greedheads.
Canada is already charging per GB (over your limit...). USA is fighting against it... but Comcast would love it.